White Mischief

by James Fox

  She lunched in the members’ restaurant with her entourage, including her stepson and heir to the Delamere estates, Hugh Cholmondeley, now Lord Delamere. When the loudspeaker was switched on, before the first race, a loud and prolonged scream—feedback—was piped into the dining room where we sat. I saw Diana mouthing with bridled irritation as the howl continued, “For God’s sake.”

  Even though I expected a flat rejection, or worse, if ever I brought up the Erroll case in her presence, there was always a slender hope that one day in the right circumstances she might talk, however briefly, to a serious historian of the subject. That possibility had to be carefully protected. It would have been convenient but in some ways dishonest for me to write that Diana refused to talk to me if my request had been made in an unsuitable setting.

  The racecourse was not the place for it. She was too exposed there. One doesn’t after all lobby members of the Royal Family at Ascot. The telephone was no good, either. You could lose it all, for ever, in a few seconds. Our first contact had to be a face to face meeting. And it had to take place on the reporter’s most ancient battleground: the front doorstep. But approaching her in her own stronghold at Soysambu looked impossible from the road. There was a distant gate in the middle of the African plain, a sentry box and a steel barrier across the road, and from these the track disappeared across the bush and over the horizon. For an unwelcome reporter to announce himself on a field telephone from a remote sentry box would plainly have been absurd. Another eighteen months were to pass before Diana and I finally met.

  22

  ABDULLAH AND THE AFGHAN PRINCESS

  Before travelling up-country I drove out of Nairobi to Karen on a still and hot afternoon, to look at the murder site again, in the hope that the terrain itself might reveal some clue to the events of that fatal morning. I knew the drive well from previous years: out of the Nairobi suburbs along a straight road that passed Nairobi racecourse and Jamhuri Park where I had once covered the annual Agricultural Show and, much impressed, watched Kenyatta declaiming and waving his fly whisk, leading the massed chants of “Harambee” (“Pull together”) in the days of “nation building” after independence.

  The Karen and Ngong roads, at whose junction the Buick was found, are now surfaced with tarmac; this and St. Andrew’s Church, a wood and stone building which stands a few yards from the old murram pit, are the only visible changes in the immediate vicinity. When you look at the site, you are immediately struck by the sharpness of the turn the Buick made as it passed the junction and veered towards the murram pit. The first impression I had was that Erroll had swerved to the right to avoid an oncoming car on the wrong side. Yet it is also possible that after the right turn and the shots, Erroll slumped forward on to the wheel, and his foot left the clutch, causing the car to swing into the grass in a tight curve. There was always that lack of any clear-cut evidence at the scene of the crime.

  The land between the junction and the Broughtons’ old house is a large meadow used for cattle pasture, divided by the road that Erroll drove down and along which Broughton may have walked back. Struck by the distance between the house and the junction (2.4 miles is farther than it sounds), I was at first convinced that the murderer must have been waiting for Erroll at the junction, and that he must have been a hired assassin rather than a member of the Karen household. Of one fact there could be no doubt, at least—that if the murderer were Broughton or anyone else in the house, he or she took a lift with Erroll on the outward journey. What I saw put a great emphasis on Broughton’s ability to cover that distance at the speed required to meet June Carberry’s alibi. (Diana was overheard to say at the trial by Harragin’s secretary, “He’s not nearly such an old crock as he’s making out.”)

  The Broughtons’ house now lay behind heavily constructed steel gates and it looked locked and empty. Its present owner was Kenyatta’s former son-in-law, Udi Gecaga, at one time a director of the English mining conglomerate, Lonhro. He told me that the driveway and the entrance to the house had since been switched from one side of the house to the other, otherwise nothing in the house had been altered.

  I took off one afternoon from Wilson airport, heading north—in a small aeroplane you are airborne and climbing six or seven seconds after the brakes are released—and flew across the hilly, rich-looking plantations of the Kikuyu, then past Nyeri Hill, whose summit shot by just below the wing-tip. Its tree-covered cone is a milestone for low-flying aviators and marks almost exactly the border between the Kikuyu settlements and the great Masai cattle plains that reach from here nearly to Lake Rudolph. Flying low along this broad valley between Mount Kenya and the Aberdare range, over the great expanse of the smooth greensward that sweeps in a long, gentle rise into the foothills of that mountain, must be one of the most exhilarating trips you could make in a small plane.

  The pilot, David Allen, is a professional game warden; the other passenger was his wife, Petal, daughter of Sir Derek Erskine. We came down on the grass strip outside the garden of their house, which faces Mount Kenya and is a few miles from Soames’s old farm, near Bergeret. That evening we fished for trout on a wooded river under tall and un-nameable African trees, and were casting again soon after sunrise the following morning.

  Some years earlier, on a hurried reporting trip I had made to Nairobi, Sir Derek Erskine had told me a story about Broughton and a horse of Erskine’s called Pantaloon—a story which had seemed significant and which I had always wanted to follow up. In the meantime Erskine had died. But the rest of his family, who had provided me with limitless hospitality on this trip, remembered it clearly. It transpired that Sir Derek had committed his memories to tape soon before he died, including those of Broughton and Pantaloon. That night his widow, Lady Erskine, offered to play me the recording.

  Although Broughton had his own stable of horses, she told me. Pantaloon was a particularly fine-looking animal, always flattering to its rider, and on the morning before the murder Broughton, who had often told Erskine that he would like to buy the horse, asked to borrow it until the following Sunday. That day Broughton was alone in Nairobi, waiting for the result of the inquest. Diana and June Carberry had gone to Nyeri. Erskine described the Sunday afternoon when Broughton returned the horse, around 4 p.m. He was one of the few people who knew the real cause of Erroll’s death.

  Jock Broughton rode up to our stables looking extremely weary on a very tired and weary looking Pantaloon. I was very shocked to see this. Jock more or less tumbled off Pantaloon and staggered into our house. We asked him if he would like a cup of tea and he said, “No, I’ve been for a very long ride which started at half-past nine this morning. I’ve had nothing to eat and I would like some gin.” My wife brought him a bottle of gin and a tumbler and he drank off a tumbler just as if it had been water.

  Then he said to me, “Have you heard anything about Joss?”

  I said, “Well, nothing except that he is dead.”

  “But what on earth happened?” said Jock. “Could it have been a heart attack?”

  And I said, “Yes, most certainly, it could have been a heart attack.”

  “But,” he said, “he was so well on Friday night, what could have brought on the heart attack?”

  And I said, “That is quite easy to answer. It was caused by a bullet through the back of his neck.”

  I watched Jock very carefully as I used these words, and from that moment on there were no doubts in my mind as to who had murdered Joss Erroll.

  What makes this conversation all the more significant is a remark Broughton made the previous day, before the murder had been announced, to Kenneth Coates, a junior police officer. He told him, “I am public suspect number one now.”

  Now, two years after that, a great friend of mine, Arthur Orchardson. who used to ride for me and was Kenya’s leading rifle shot, was riding out by the murrain pit when he came across what looked like a rusty weapon. He dismounted and picked it up and there was a pistol which he brought to me and showed it to me and im
mediately we decided that this had better be done away with and we buried it where it could never be found again.

  At lunch with the Erskines two days later, I met a woman known as the Afghan Princess, a woman who seemed utterly English, who told me that she remembered Lord Erroll. She had been in this district all her life and her late husband had been A.D.C. to that same Duke of Gloucester who had irritated Njonjo, the Attorney-General. Together they had lived out the Emergency, staying put on their remote farm after most of the whites had abandoned the country for the town. “He shot one,” said the Princess, referring respectively to her husband and a Mau Mau fighter, “at the bottom of the garden.”

  When the Princess invited me to stay the night I packed up and went with her, although I had no idea how much she knew. She lived in the same district, near an outpost for retired settlers known locally as “Blood Pressure Ridge.” Her mother was from a ruling Afghan family and had married her father, an Englishman, in India. Thus the Princess was a true “Anglo-Indian,” although to speak to her she might have spent all her life in the southern counties of England. Down the drive came a pack of ten or twelve of the fiercest and loudest dogs imaginable. The Princess was a breeder of Rhodesian Ridgebacks, so-called because the hackles along their spines are permanently raised.

  It was immediately clear that the Princess knew almost nothing about Erroll: her only quote which I thought worth recording was “Erroll was good at everything.” Nevertheless, she was extremely hospitable, although the Ridgebacks occupied all the seating space, and it seemed unwise to ask them to move. Only the Princess’s chair was empty, and I sat in it. Her daughter-in-law, who lived with her, said, “That is her chair. Just thought I’d let you know. Don’t suppose it matters for tea.”

  At six, the silent Somali head servant laid the table for dinner, with the place mats with the hunting scenes, the pickle bottles and the silver salt and pepper pots, and the water jug with the beaded linen cover.

  The food was superb. Sherry, as usual, with the soup; filet mignon, carrots and perfect little roast potatoes. There was then a pause, and the pause turned into a wait. The expected savoury did not appear. Her kitchen had recently burned to the ground and a temporary one had been set up across the yard, in the darkness. The Afghan Princess became impatient and very cross. (To the switchboard operator at Nanyuki she had screamed, “Oh, wash your ears out, you ber-luddy man.”) The Swahili word for “where” is “wapi.” Now the Princess got up from the table, approached the threshold, and shouted into the darkness, “Wapi Seconds?”

  Out of the African night came an exquisite béchamelled egg with anchovy, in a perfect pastry tart, cooked on a paraffin stove somewhere near the chicken run. All was well, yet I wondered how the Princess had survived, badmouthing these Africans so venomously all these years. In Nanyuki I discovered that she was considered merely eccentric; that she had performed many acts of kindness and that these weighed greatly in her favour.

  The Afghan Princess released me the following day, and I left for Lake Naivasha, and the last traces of both Erroll and Broughton, the present estates of Diana Delamere. I rented a house once owned by Kiki Preston, the lady with the silver syringe, in a wild and isolated recess of the lake—a place to write and a base for investigative sorties, where, except for Stefan, the houseboy, I was alone.

  Early each morning I would walk along the edge of Lake Naivasha beneath jacaranda and pepper trees and large and ancient thorns, putting up flights of water birds along the shore. When I felt the real heat of the sun I would turn back for the coolness of the fresh paw-paw and pineapple already laid out in the shade for my return. It seemed to me that the surface of the lake had changed, often dramatically, each time I looked back at the water. First it was a mirror lake traversed by gangs of enormously beaked pelicans whose progress left no single impression on the glassy water. A minute later a sudden wind had transformed it into a blustering Scottish loch with a surface current and whitecaps. The light can change with an equal suddenness. At times there is a clarity of detail at great distances when, for example, each branch of a thorn tree on the far bank is minutely sharp to the eye. Instantly it will become a dull strip of grey, and without a cloud in the sky to account for the change. This can produce mild hallucinations as the middle distance advances and recedes, and you can soon begin to feel oppressed by the strange gloom of this lake, with its isolated houses and its wide lawns that slip into the water as if the lake were slowly flooding. When loneliness was beginning to affect Broughton’s mental stability, how desperate he must have felt in these surroundings.

  Two miles around the bay from the garden of my own house, I could just see the top of the white crenellated tower of the Djinn Palace above a clump of trees. It had been restored by a German businessman, and the old Moroccan courtyard with its fountain and mosaics now looked like a well-furnished garden centre. The fountain had been filled in. The woodwork, however, and the mosaic bar had been left intact.

  During the war years there was distinguished company on this wild part of the lake. The late Aga Khan lived in the Preston house and Prince Paul of Yugoslavia in the house next door, sharing the same lawn.

  That house is now owned by Baron Knapitsch, the trophy hunter. The Baron has shot so many animals, large and small, commemorating each by the horns, that the gentlemen’s cloakroom, taking up the overflow from his cavernous sitting rooms, bristles with the antlers of dik-dik and Grant’s gazelle. The Baron has even arranged two enormous fallen branches in an arch in the garden, to remind him of a monumental pair of elephant tusks.

  He invited me for dinner. I bathed and walked across the lawn. He said, “You can’t imagine the game here a few years ago. Wonderful. Incredible.” Diana had been to stay with him in his Austrian castle. He said, “Beautiful woman. No. Really. Beautiful.”

  Colvile, he said, had owned 60,000 acres here on Lake Naivasha, 140,000 at Rumuruti and 30,000 elsewhere. (An estimate near the average: the settlers’ view is that Colvile left 200,000 acres when he died.) The Baron said that Colvile owned 29,000 head of cattle (“Incredible. Even by Brazilian standards. No.”), and that he had given Diana half the rights to his farms when they married.

  One day towards the end of my stay I came across what looked like a very promising lead. On one of my journeys around the lake I had met by chance the old Somali servant who had worked for Soames, and for several of Erroll’s friends. His employer suggested I speak to him, primarily because of his age. When his connection with Soames was revealed, it seemed a stroke of extraordinary luck.

  With his employer translating, the Somali spoke, at first, with caution. Translation: “He says that during the brief time he was in Kenya, the servants, in general, liked Broughton. But because he was a newcomer, they couldn’t really say.”

  After a while he simply said, “Yes, I know a lot about Lord Erroll—Bwana Hay—and … I would like to tell you about him.”

  What followed, according to the translation, was a version of the events of January 1941 that was breathtaking in its accuracy. Lapses into hearsay and distortion would have been understandable. But this Somali, forty years later, picked out the prosecution case in great detail, and never put a foot wrong as far as the record is concerned. It was an impressive performance, untainted by the rumour that so often diminished the accuracy of the settlers’ accounts.

  The affair had been intensely debated between the Somali and his colleagues at the time, he remembered. It was his personal opinion, having discussed the matter with the other servants, that the old man shot Erroll himself. Were any of these other servants still alive? I mentioned Abdullah bin Ahmed, Broughton’s head boy, a witness at the trial. Yes, said the Somali, Abdullah was his closest friend and he lived now in Kilifi. He added that he was convinced that Abdullah knew exactly what had happened, but if I went to find him I was not to say that he had told me this. It was Abdullah who had put out the bonfire on Broughton’s instructions, and Abdullah who knew what was burning. Yes, of course
the bonfire was discussed between them.

  When Broughton left Kenya, he added, Diana had kept Abdullah as a servant, but when she married Colvile, many of the servants, including Abdullah, didn’t approve of the marriage. Colvile was like a Masai, he had a Masai driver. Diana was fine. She wasn’t rubbish, and she never let common people into her house. But Colvile, this Masai, was mean, and all the servants left. This was only the first time Abdullah left. He was later sacked twice for drunkenness, but he always came back.

  Diana got on well with Abdullah despite the drinking. Many years ago, after the incidents that temporarily ended Abdullah’s employment, Diana got hold of him, took him back to Kilifi and said, “Work there.” He has been on a pension ever since. It is a very long pension. “Diana,” said the Somali, “is rather like his mother. She doesn’t want Abdullah to get into trouble.” He was certain, he repeated, that Abdullah knew who shot Lord Erroll, but it was up to Abdullah to say. He might be scared to talk, but he, the Somali, would give directions where to find him on the coast.

  A few days later, in the intense and airless heat that can sometimes descend on that coast, I drove to Kilifi from Mombasa to look for Abdullah, with a journalist friend of mine from Nairobi, Mary Ann Fitzgerald, as interpreter.

  At the Kilifi ferry, waiting to cross, we bought guava juice and cashews and looked at the hulks of the old ferry rafts lying seaward on the mud next to the ford. The rare photograph of Diana and Joss together during their brief romance was taken on one of these ferries, which at that time were pulled across the creek on a long chain.

  We began enquiring for Abdullah near the market place in Kilifi town, only a few hundred yards away from Diana’s coast house, the “Villa Buzzer” (Buzzer being Diana’s nickname for Tom). In a general store almost empty of goods except for a large supply of rosewater, and with a huge paraffin fridge as its centrepiece, we heard that Abdullah did live in the vicinity but that he was an old man and very ill. Two small boys guided our car along mud tracks between buildings made of soft coral stone and tin, mangrove poles and mud, each separated from each other by heaps of rubbish. A palm tree growing in the middle of the street blocked our car, and from there we walked, stopping eventually at a narrow wooden door, almost hidden behind a makeshift wall of building blocks.